Anna Boleyn

Emil Jannings plays King Henry VIII in the story of Anne Boleyn’s movement from the outskirts of the court, to the royal boudoir, and off to the chopping-block. Suffused with an atmosphere of entrapment that would not be out of place in later films by Fritz Lang, and prefiguring the stately contretemps in John Ford’s Mary of Scotland, Anna Boleyn proceeds with a deathward momentum unique in Lubitsch’s oeuvre.